Brendan is the Associate Director for Partnerships and Community Engagement in the Epistemic Analytics lab. He is passionate about making connections in the growing field of Quantitative Ethnography (QE) and is actively involved in the International Society for Quantitative Ethnography (ISQE). Brendan earned his Ph.D. in Learning Sciences from UW-Madison in 2020.
Photo: Brendan with his son Aidan at the Georgia Aquarium, 2015.
Brendan is interested in mixed methods in educational research and the assessment of complex thinking. His research includes the development and application of two tools of Quantitative Ethnography. The first is Epistemic Network Analysis, an innovative method for assessing complex thinking skills. The second is nCoder, a tool for the development, refinement, and validation of automated coding schemes. Additionally, he has worked on a statistical method for the generalization of inter-rater reliability (IRR). rhoR is an R package that computes a new statistical test for validating measures of IRR. The new test, Shaffer's rho, is a Monte Carlo rejective method of testing the generalizability of any binary IRR statistic.
[You can download rhoR from CRAN now!]
